GRAVITATIONAL PHASE-TRANSITIONS IN INFRARED QUANTUM-GRAVITY

The conformal anomaly induced sector of four-dimensional quantum gravi ty (ir quantum gravity), which has been introduced by Antoniadis and M ottola, is studied here on a curved fiducial background. The one-loop effective potential for the effective conformal factor theory is calcu lated with accuracy, including terms linear in the curvature. It is pr oved that a curvature induced phase transition can actually take place . An estimation of the critical curvature for different choices of the parameters of the theory is given.